I love reading with my daughter, Poesy, who has just turned six. We agree on almost all of her favorites, and re-reading them is one of our best-loved activities, and how we pass the time on boring bus-rides and so forth. However, there are a few books that Poesy loves, but which leave me cold. First among these is are the Ariol books, a long-running French kids’ comic series that are being swiftly translated into English by Papercutz (there are three books out so far, and a fourth is due in May). Ariol was co-created by the amazing and talented Emmanuel Guibert, whose other work includes the anarcho-gonzo Sardine kids’ comics; the brilliant WWI memoir Alan’s War, and the extraordinary memoir of doctors in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan The Photographer.

I love Guibert, but not Ariol. Poesy, on the other hand, can’t get enough of it. This is cool — and better than cool, because my reluctance to read her these books over and over (and over and over) has actually driven her to be a much better independent reader, and she often picks up an Ariol book, sits herself down, and reads it to herself for hours, snickering. Ariol is like your kid’s obnoxious friend who is so incredibly naughty that you dread his visits, and who your kid adores and wants to play with all the time (thankfully, he also lives in a comic book).

It’s exciting to see Poesy developing her own taste, separate from ours, and I wanted to give her a chance to explain what she likes about Ariol. So we sat down in my office and recorded this video review together. If you’ve got little anarcho-readers in your household, Poesy wants you to know that you should let them read some Ariol books.

There’s also a long-running French-Canadian Ariol cartoon, which has been dubbed into many languages. You can find tons on Youtube, including this English one.

Ariol #1: Just a Donkey Like You and Me

Ariol #2: Thunder Horse

Ariol #3: Happy as a Pig…

Ariol #4: A Beautiful Cow [forthcoming May 6, 2014]

As you may have noticed, I think Litographs are really cool: the company turns the text of various books into a piece of appropriately themed text-art and makes lithographs, tees and tote-bags out of it.

Now, I’m delighted to announce that the company has produced a line of Litographs based on my novel Little Brother, with a gorgeous anti-surveillance design by Benjy Brooke.

The Little Brother Litograph is available as a poster in three sizes, a tee (bearing the first 75,000 words of the book), and a tote (bearing 20,000 words).

Each piece is custom-made, and you can choose between a variety of color schemes or a black-and-white design. Tees are two-sided, screened from collar to hem, and come in both boy- and girl-cuts.

The company sends a new, high quality book to the International Book Bank for every poster they sell.

For this week only, you can get $5 off any Litograph product with the discount code M1k3y.

Little Brother

Yesterday, I delivered a keynote address for the 2014 Museums and the Web Conference in Florence, speaking in the audience chamber of the Palazzo Vecchio, which is pretty much the definition of working the big room at the palace. The organizers will be uploading video shortly, but in the meantime, they’ve been kind enough to post the crib for my talk, which is pretty extensive. The talk was called “GLAM (galleries, museums, archives and libraries) and the Free World”:

* The information age is, in many ways, the beginning of history

* It’s a moment at which every person is swiftly becoming an archivist of her own life, a curator of billions of blips of ephemeral communications and ruminations and interactions

* As any archaeologist who’s ever rejoiced at finding a midden that reveals how normal people lived their lives in antiquity can tell you, this ephemera, so rare and badly preserved through most of our history, is of incalculable value

* Which would you rather see: an oil painting of a Victorian monarch, a ramrod stiff photo of your great-grandmother in her confirmation smock, or a hundred transcripts of the conversations she shared with her peers and her family?

* The tools by which we accomplish this archival business are, of course, computers

* Carried in our bags and pockets, worn in and on our bodies

* There is one group of people in the world who understand how archiving works, who understand the importance of the ephemeral en masse, who can steer us to personal and cultural practices of preservation, archiving, dissemination, and access — it’s you, the museum sector

* Just as librarians — who have toiled for centuries at the coalface of information and authority, systematizing the process of figuring out which sources to trust and why — are more needed than ever now, when we are all of us required to sort the credible from the non-credible every time we type a keyword into a search box

* So too are curators and archivists more needed than ever, now that we are all archiving and curating all the live-long day

GLAM and the Free World

Locus Magazine has published its annual Recommended Reading list, which is my favorite annual guide to the best that science fiction and fantasy have to offer. The 2013 roundup includes several of the books I’ve reviewed on Boing Boing this year, including Paolo Bacigalupi’s Zombie Baseball Beatdown, Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood, Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls, Richard Kadrey’s Dead Set, Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam, Ian Tregillis’s Necessary Evil, Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown and Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters.

I’m also delighted to see that my novel Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother) made the list!

The whole list is just a fantastic signposting of the best the field has to offer.

2013 Locus Recommended Reading List

(via Tor.com)